Category Archives: Uncategorized

In December 2016, I wrote:

Thought 3:  I am not sure that water policy will be the dominant force on CA agriculture this year.  Immigration and labor could be big.  But I’m looking hard at trade.  Trump seems to be going out of his way to offend China and India, who are large markets for tree nuts.  If Trump provokes a trade war, or a real war, with China, I’m thinking that this post of mine will seem prescient.  Almond orchards are all the same asset; holdings in tree nuts are not a diversified portfolio.  If there’s an overseas market bust, there will be an unbelievable surplus of harvested almonds, with more new orchards coming into bearing years.  Although the instream flow proposals are being touted as a terrible pressure on northern San Joaquin Valley economies, after a China/India trade bust, it may be that land prices collapse and easiest ways to get flows back in the river are to simply buy up abandoned almond orchards.

And today we get Indian tariffs on almonds.  This comes a month after the Chinese tariffs on almonds.  We should not be surprised if land prices for almond orchards collapse.  We should be considering how that land can be used next (rewilding) and who will bear the costs of cleaning up abandoned orchards.

It was always clear that Trump destroys everything he touches.  Californian growers may be blinding themselves to that, but the destruction he causes will come for them anyway.  He was never on ag’s side; he is a New York developer.  To the extent that agricultural voters chose him, they were choosing this.  If we escape the Trump presidency without a nuclear war, for the rest of my life, I will always boggle that he caused more damage to Nunes/almond growers/Valadao than my advocacy ever could.

UPDATE 6/28/18:  Naw. Valley Republicans are in thrall to Trump.  I never worry that the current version of Republicans will take sensible preventative measures that would avert a disaster for their constituents.

I searched the archives and it does not appear that I have written about my genuine fondness for Mr. Todd Fitchette, Associate Editor at the Western Farm Press.  I find that he is nearly always thinking about the very same topic as I am, only completely opposite.  I had great sympathy with one of his op-eds saying, more or less, ‘I just don’t want to think about water for a while’.  I hear you, brother.

This past week, Mr. Fitchette has been asking, plaintively, why he is forced to defend the need for food and water.  Usually, I have no solace for Mr. Fitchette, since he and I have the opposite policy prescriptions.  But this time, I can help Mr. Fitchette with his dilemma.  In fact, I can assure Mr. Fitchette that this problem is entirely under his control, and that he can resolve it whenever he chooses.

https://twitter.com/ToddFitchette/status/1006927864803889152

It would be very peculiar to defend the need for food and water, so it is fortunate that no one is attacking the need for food and water.  I like to believe that I am among the urban cognoscenti calling for drastic changes to agriculture.  Even among my snide acquaintances, there is none who stands outside restaurants mocking the diners for having to eat.

Mr. Fitchette is using a rhetorical technique that has long distressed me.  In his piece, he conflates a criticism of ‘some externalities of some types of agriculture’ to an attack on ‘all of agriculture’ to an attack ‘the human requirement for food and water’.  I have often found this type of synecdoche puzzling, because I, an ignorant city person, understand that there is a great range of agriculture, both by practices and location, and when I say that I’d like to see the end of huge corporate tree nut businesses, I am not saying that I want all agriculture to end in the state.  Moreover, I can tell the fucking difference between those two statements.

Mr. Fitchette, it seems, has trouble with this concept.  I’ve seen that problem elsewhere, at CDFA board meetings for example, during the 2006-2009 drought, when they kept saying that “agriculture is getting no water”, when an accurate statement would have been that some farms on the west side of the Valley were not getting delivered water. And here is where I can offer Mr. Fitchette some help.  Mr. Fitchette can instantly solve his mental anguish by returning to specificity.  This is under his control! Rather than trying to find a way to defend the human need for food, he could be listening attentively to the specific critiques of some practices of some kinds of agriculture from a small town mayor.  Then, he could be having conversations about whether those specific practices are necessary, or wise, or widespread.  Those conversations could be interesting and useful!

It is clear why large ag proponents want to conflate all agriculture.  They are hoping to tap into the American affection for the romantic vision of the family farm.  But in the Trump era, I think ag proponents have pushed too far.  Poppy Davis tweeted this in April:

That was insightful and prescient.  To the extent small farmers were Trump voters, they forfeited our sympathy for their labor problems and international trade woes.  They chose what they got; my concerns will go towards the victims of Trump policy that didn’t choose to be in our situation.  So big ag wants to hide behind the image of small ag, and much of small ag just took their historical American goodwill and fucked it sideways.  Mr. Fitchette will have his work cut out for him in the next couple years.  I am happy to advise him any time he likes.

Twitter served me a slow, sweet softball this morning.  Behold, two pictures of very recent meetings on the Friant.

I did not attend either meeting.  But we can discern some things, just from the pictures.  First, shall we note?  The picture of the SJV Water Infrastructure Authority includes no women, and by appearances, perhaps three men of color.  Also, they’re all old.  Without counting, I can say the Water Solutions Network meeting looks to be half women; youth and people of color were throughout.  They are still all listening to an old white dude (Snow), but they’ve got a man at one of the easels (countering the ‘chicks are secretaries’ bias), so I’ll let it pass.

Notice the different room set-ups.  The SJV Water Infrastructure Authority reinforces hierarchy.  The panel is set up behind a raised dias, listening to (appears to be) a couple technocrats, seated physically lower than the panel.  The Water Solutions Network is in a circle set-up without a favored “head” end.  I actually tend to find ‘circle of chairs’ a bit exposed and prefer ‘circle of tables’, but it is a physically egalitarian set-up.

I can make predictions from the pictures alone:

The results of the SJV Water Infrastructure Authority will be to double down.  They will come out of that meeting decided to do whatever they were doing before (lobbying politicians who look like them, spending money), only MORE.  They have not created a meeting that will bring them new ideas, because they have not included the kinds of people who think different things from them.  Those technocrats behind the table likely think that their jobs are to predict what the men on the dias want, and to find evidence or means to support what the panel wants to do. Our current system is so good to the men who sit on that dias that they are forced to think that it is a good system, and they will only work to do MORE within their old concepts and structures.

The Water Solutions Network meeting will produce a lot, and a lot of it will be diffuse and hard to implement.  I am sure that a lot of the work on those easels will be broad statements of preference (that I almost certainly agree with, but).  There will be suggestions that are so different from our current system that it is very difficult to think of policy or technical bridges to that endpoint. Some of the ideas will contradict each other.  And, importantly, the concept that will end up doing the work is included in there.  A lot of what these participants bring will not get used, but that is not time wasted.  Participating builds capacity for the attendees; their input tells the currently powerful in the room where the field is heading.

The organizers of both meetings will get what they wanted from their own meeting.  The meeting structure is not neutral; it replicates the forms of societies the organizers want to see (the kinds of participants, hierarchical or egalitarian). I believe the organizers of the SJVWIA meeting should be asking themselves a different question: “will this meeting bring us what we need to advance our project in today’s world?”.  But if they were capable of asking that question, they already wouldn’t be holding their meetings in a hearing room.

For a while, I went to school with a woman who had just left working for Cadiz.  She is shockingly funny, and told me stories about how great it was to work for Cadiz.  It was pretty fun, I hear, to zoom up to the desert on a Friday night and stay at Sun World and drink at rural bars and eat amazing fruit.  That does indeed sound great. When we realized we were both in the water field, she told me about the Cadiz project; how they were going to sell their groundwater to LA.  I winced at that and she reassured me.  It was no problem, she said; the aquifer wasn’t connected to anything.  At that moment, I knew the project was bullshit, because “not connected to anything” isn’t a possible thing.  It was the early 2000’s and she told me that the Cadiz project was definitely going to happen, because Keith Brackpool was very good at Grey Davis’ preferred type of fellatio(her explanation, my classy paraphrase).

Now friends of this blog, if you study a map, you will see that neither the Mojave Desert nor Los Angeles are in the Central Valley.  Since you are all long-time readers, you know that my small and limited attention goes only towards water issues in the Central Valley.  So even though the Cadiz project has been self-evident bullshit since the very first I heard of it, and even though I have found its opponents to be brilliant and its supporters to be paid hacks, I don’t believe I’ve ever written about it here.

I’m still don’t have much to say about Cadiz, but I do want to answer a related question my friend asked me.  When I said there’s no way that water in a desert aquifer is unconnected to the surface desert ecology, she asked, but what if it were?  If it were unconnected, why not send that water to Los Angeles?  For the sake of that question, I will set aside the potential harm of the pipeline itself and the cost and pretend that this project is both spherical and frictionless. I’ll also answer that question as someone who is partial to Los Angeles.

My answer is no, even were it costless, Cadiz shouldn’t be built.  It shouldn’t be built because Los Angelenos can live within their existing supply.  Decoupling was evident even in the early 2000’s; hell, it had been obvious since the ’80’s, when the Mono Lake Committee proved that L.A. could replace Mono Lake water with conserved water.  I do understand that many more people will live in L.A., but I also know that we have not begun to approach a gppd so low that Angelenos (or, more broadly any Californians that have reliable water service) drop out of a first world quality of life.  Further, the region has the money to pursue the next-most-expensive chunks of internal water.  I reject the assertion that growth for southern California requires Cadiz’s water, and for that matter, I don’t want Californians tied to the traditional economic concept of growth.

I have come to a conclusion, here in 2018, as I look at the sleazy fucks who have resuscitated Cadiz.  As #MeToo develops, I am realizing that it is all the same extraction mindset.  Either people believe that the other has inherent worth and should be met in mutually beneficial agreement, or people believe that the other is not as important as themselves and is a target for extraction.  Desert water; living rivers; people’s labor; environmental absorption capacity; Tribal land; sex, time, attention from a weaker party.  To a taker, they’re all just stocks, insufficiently guarded.  Witnessing extraction in one realm should alert the viewer that they are viewing someone with an extractive mindset; it is likely that person is dangerous in multiple realms.  Which is a long way of saying what the last nearly twenty years have made clear: Cadiz is a terrible project supported by terrible people.

A reader sent this to me.  This seems like a nice way to celebrate a big setback for Temperance Flats dam.

On Erik Loomis’ recommendation, I’m reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s fantastic book: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.  I haven’t gotten very far, but it has already provided me with this (pg 5-6):

…[T]here is one connection between economy and environment that seems important to introduce up front: the history of the human concentration of wealth through making both humans and nonhumans into resources for investment.   This history has inspired investors to imbue both people and things with alienation, that is, the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter. Through alienation, people and things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their life worlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds elsewhere. … The dream of alienation inspires landscape modification in which only one stand-alone asset matters; everything else becomes weeds or waste.  Here, attending to living-space entanglements seems inefficient, and perhaps archaic.  When its singular asset can no longer be produced, a place can be abandoned.  The timber has been cut; the oil has run out; the plantation soil no longer supports crops.  The search for assets resumes elsewhere.  Thus, simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment for asset production.

In other news, the California Almond Acreage Report came out yesterday.

California’s 2017 almond acreage is estimated at 1,330,000 acres, up 7 percent from the 2016 acreage of 1,240,000.

UPDATE 6/18/19: A spectacular illustration of the standardization and alienation of capitalism. These are factories, not living landscapes.  Life will return to them when agriculture abandons these lands.

UPDATE 6/24/19: These are outdoor factories. The Plantationocene.

A bill proposed by Assemblyman James Gallagher which would take the State Water Project out of the hands of the state Department of Water Resources passed unanimously on Tuesday through a legislative committee.

Assembly Bill 3045 passed 15-0 through the Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee and is now headed to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

For the record, I think that this is a fantastic idea.  I believe the Assembly Committeee suggested that the new operating entity be headed by an appointed nine-person board.  Gallegher is exactly right when he says that DWR is co-opted by the SWC.  Further, the new entity that receives the SWP should also acquire the CVP and operate them jointly.

Link, although the text there doesn’t yet reflect yesterday’s conversation within the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife.

The interesting thing about Ryan Sabalow’s recent essay about his grief at the drying of the once-marshy Colorado Delta is that it flips the way that most news media gets stories wrong.  Usually, mainstream media is good on the intellectual content but ignores or undervalues the emotional content.  In Sabalow’s essay, he gets the emotional content right; the destruction of two million acres of wetlands is a tragic, wracking loss.  However, his intellectual argument for how we participate in this destruction misses the mark.  He writes:

We’re all reliant on the Colorado in some way.

Ever eat lettuce in the winter? Wear cotton underwear? Watch a Hollywood-produced blockbuster or sitcom? Party in Vegas? Catch a Cactus League baseball game?

You’re why the Colorado is dry.
So am I.

Our fault here is not that we participate in consuming products that are created out of Colorado River water.  We, people who live in California, cannot not participate in that.  We have no practical means of choosing where our tap water comes from, nor the irrigation source for our lettuces and cotton fabrics.  We have no ability to opt-out of this market and the destruction of the Colorado Delta, so we cannot be faulted for participating in it.

If we despise the destruction of our rivers and river deltas, the way we can avert that is to recognize that the value by which we currently allocate rivers is “will the end product create profit in the global market?”.  This is not the neutral and inevitable state of the world; it is the default we have arrived at.  We could choose another value system and allocate water that way.  (For example, we like having two million acres of thriving wetlands above the Gulf of Mexico.  Or, we like having salmon runs on the San Joaquin River.)

If Mr. Sabalow wants to carry with him the (appropriate, well-expressed) pain he felt that day and use it to motivate useful work, he can do better than pointing the finger at our indirect culpability.  I would rather that he start noticing where that default value (producing profit in the global market) is operating. He can look at analyses with that lens firmly in mind.  The PPIC, for example, is thoroughly wed to the use of the current standard (that profit in the global market is the right way to allocate water) and doesn’t do any analysis in any other mode.  The Wheeler Water Institute, by contrast, explicitly notes the importance of societal goals and values in their work.

When it is clearer to people that we are not choosing between ‘the inevitable way the world works’ and ‘your fetishistic hippy ideals’ but between two equally arbitrary values, we can start to decide which values we would like to use to allocate water.  As we do that, the reminder of the painful costs of our current default is relevant and important.

As everyone said at the time, Mark Arax’s reporting on the Resnicks‘ involvement in Kern is wonderful. I listened to interviews with Arax afterward. For this post, I am going to assume that you have the story open in a tab nearby; quoting as much as I’d otherwise need to would get long.

Thoughts:

Arax really gives Lynda Resnick her due. In the story and consistently through his radio interviews, he mentions her business and marketing skill. When interviewers bring up Stewart and not Lynda, he corrects them. Lynda Resnick is as much a piece of the story as Stewart and it is nice to see that explicitly laid out.

Similarly, Arax gets the story he does because he interviews a few of the field workers. They point him toward the Vidovich/Resnick illegal pipeline and discuss life in Lost Hills. Treating them as professionals and not anonymous labor tipped off Arax to the pipeline and salinity incursions.

***

Even Arax, as much a local as anyone could be, makes the mistake of underestimating the scale of the Resnicks’ holdings. He comments on the Resnicks removing 22,000 acres of trees to show that the drought threatened their holdings. He also tells us that the Resnicks own 180,000 acres in CA, irrigating 121,000 of them. For all that removing tens of thousands of acres sounds like a lot, it is still less than 20% of their irrigated acreage and less than 10% of their holdings in CA land. I have no doubt buying water during the drought diminished their profit margins in tree nuts and that some orchards weren’t worth irrigating with expensive water. But I don’t think that even tearing out 22,000 acres of trees reflects a threat to their business. It is yet bigger than that.

***

A couple things surprised me. I just didn’t expect an illegal, self-installed pipeline. When I talk about how hard it is to move water, I wasn’t expecting someone with infinite money, nor completely unpermitted small-scale infrastructure. I never imagined a public agency doing that, yet Dudley Ridge WD and Lost Hills WD allowed it (more on that later).

I was also surprised to read that Wonderful doesn’t hassle with precision agriculture. I think I remember from Arax’s book, King of California, that the Boswell Farming Company paid a lot of attention to detail. At a recent irrigation conference, I was surprised at the extent of technology some farming companies use to improve their yields or their profit margins. I wonder what is being lost by their acceptance of “mediocre” yields; they might be missing the first few years of declining yields from salinity

***

Stewart Resnick appears to have zero understanding of climate change. His description of a five-year drought as a surprising piece of bad luck and not the aridification that the past twenty years of climate modeling has consistently predicted means that he still doesn’t appreciate it. Stewart Resnick says that he has hired good people, but if none of them have been planning for climate change (aridification and loss of chilling hours) then they are not doing their jobs.

****

Resnick’s conclusion after the drought was that he should farm on lands with two water sources.

From now on, they’ll grow on land that offers a double protection against drought. “State or federal water isn’t enough. We want good groundwater, too.”

Thing is, everywhere in the Valley were he can also get good groundwater will also have more governance. Those lands have districts, and towns in them that aren’t on land owned by the Resnicks. They will have new neighbors, perhaps ones that don’t turn a blind eye to illegal pipelines. The south and west Valley are places that can be wholly owned, like the managers of the Dudley Ridge and Lost Hills water districts. But places with better water already have established interests. It will be much more expensive for the Resnicks to buy their way, if it is even possible. The new boards of directors, of districts and groundwater sustainability agencies, are going to be more difficult for one or two billionaires to control. I’m not sure that what the Resnicks have is replicable or portable.

***

At the end of his article and in every interview he gives, Mark Arax is dismayed by the future he predicts. He believes Vidovich and large farming companies will inevitably sell water away from farming. I agree with Arax that they intend to. I am less certain it will happen, for three reasons.

• I don’t believe everyone, especially the people in the west valley who have junior water rights, will be selling off water as they retire from farming.  A great deal of that future water will simply not fall on California in a form that is economical to catch.  The land will be retired, yes, but the water that Arax imagines being sold will not arrive in the first place.  Or, it will be kept in the ground to meet new sustainability standards.
• It is true that many more houses will be built, but housing does not need to require the amount of water that we have been allotting to it.  New standards for indoor water use, laws like the model landscape ordinance, and an ethic of dense infill mean that the inevitable new housing does not demand large amounts of previously agricultural water.
• We could choose.  We could decide that we want to have a thriving farming community on the east side of the valley, because it is nice and we like farming towns and we want food security for California.  We could make laws to support a couple million acres of farming preserve, like land use laws and changing water rights.  We could decide that what an open market allows is actually fairly shitty, and not a good use of our ag land nor our rivers. We can choose to avoid the fate Arax predicts, because we know there will be substantial change within a generation and we would like to shape what is left for the benefit of everyone who lives in the Valley.

***

There is a little bit more, but I am properly ashamed to write it.  Still, IIDSSM, I am very pleased by how well Arax’s reporting matches what I have deduced over the years from a distance.  I’ve used a good education, news stories, government reports and satellite pictures to come to conclusions and I came to much of the same understandings that Arax did.  I thought that it was bizarre that the irrigation districts on the west side have no effective oversight despite their structural similarities to districts in more populated areas, and that proved to lead to illegal diversions.  I talked about these areas as feudal societies, and Arax’s reporting confirms that.  I think creeping salinity is going to be huge, just like the bureaucrats report, and so do the fieldmen that Arax talks to.  I still doubt my notions of the future of water in the Valley, but this article was satisfying for me.

I have not been writing here because my mind is colonized by Trump.  Just like they warned us, the ceaseless distraction makes it very hard to concentrate and create.

I have not been writing because of Twitter.  If I only have one thought about an article, I mention that on Twitter and have done.  I used to gather those into a news round-up, but Twitter ruins everything.

I have not been writing because I do not feel that I have stayed current on my favorite topic, agriculture in the Central Valley.  I have never disguised the fact that I am not a local and that I get my information from text.  But I long thought I understood trends and I was one of the few foolishbold enough to extrapolate from them.  Now I am not certain I know where things are going, and I don’t want to be one of the geezers loudly repeating policy recommendations that were on point two decades ago.  I also don’t want to be making arguments for things that are already too timid or mostly accomplished; it is possible that events have passed me by.

Here are some things that I don’t know:

I do not understand the current labor market in the SJV.  I don’t know whether farmworker towns will persist or disperse, whether there will be a replacement generation of farmworkers, whether farmworkers are now receiving decent wages and able to choose working conditions.

I do not understand the forms of power in the Valley.  I had thought the connected-white-man form of power was on the wane.  It may yet be.  But it held out last year and this, although it continues to cost staggering amounts of money and not achieve desired results (new dams, the drainage deal, wet water, unlimited gw pumping, privacy). I cannot tell how much strength new woman-led coalitions (like the Community Water Center) have, nor how social media connections are solidifying new power nodes.

I also don’t know how to gauge the political temperament in the Valley.  I’d be embarrassed to make recommendations about zoning for food scarcity as if that were daring only to find out that the radicals in the Valley are themselves ready for a kibbutz model.  I do not know how much younger generations in the Valley identify with ag.  I do not know whether Valley farmers are still in denial about climate change.

I am no longer sure how water use is shaped.  I used to think the drivers were the human desire to maintain whatever they are currently used to and the international market for almonds.  Now I wonder about heat (literal hot temperatures) and how fury at Trump and older generations for what they’ve cost the young will show up.  I am certain that I am at least a decade behind on technology use in ag, especially remote sensing. More broadly, throughout the state, it is becoming clear that homelessness is now an important water issue, which I did not predict nor recognize until a local water manager told me.

As I watch, I see hints of new things that make me doubt my generalizations and extrapolations.  I want to safeguard OtPR’s credibility, but am equally certain that cautious blogging is boring blogging. So I haven’t had much left to say.